What a year it has been..‪.‬ The Debra Kouda Podcast

First off, I would like to say thank you for all your support during this past year regarding my entrepreneurship ventures.
I put together 2 pitches this year asking for $20K through a program, Venture Devils, at ASU. While I received amazing feedback on the pitches, I did not receive any funding.
Each time I went back to the drawing board as to where the issue was and how I could change the development plan of Ékodjayé, the T3 Innovation Hub in Benin.
What I realized after the pitch in the spring has been monumental in how I am approaching this venture, as well as my doctoral dissertation.
(That is right…I will be defending my dissertation proposal this fall!)
I went back to my WHY…
In Benin, after you finish your general education (through high school in US terms), you take le Bac, the national test, which determines your eligibility to move on and continue your studies at the University level.
Over the last 5 years, the average passing rate of the 33,000 students who took le Bac in our region was 40%. This means that over the past 5 years, 13,000 students passed, while 20,000 were left without the opportunity to go on and continue their studies at the university level. And this is just in our region of the country.
This is the group that we are wanting to address - to provide hope and opportunities.
The T3 Alliance programs, which I was using on adapting for Èkodjayé, were developed to exist within a formal education setting.
However, in Benin, we are not working within a formal education setting. And yet, I was trying to take the T3 Alliance program and make it fit within an informal education setting. This was the lightbulb that popped on after the last pitch.
This past year has provided many networking opportunities and has allowed me to have conversations with people that might help me address this issue, including being invited to the Clinton Global Initiative University.
One conversation that brought about different answers to the above dilemma was this question - if the students (and in this case, the students are community members - not students in a formal education environment) go through these different curriculums, do you have a job waiting for them at the end?
No. I don’t.
In the T3 Alliance model, the students move on to the University and finish their education where a job is most likely a reality at the end of their studies (especially within the fields that they are studying).
So the new idea that has developed is this -
I am going to tap into The Kouda Company, the tourism business that my husband and I started just as the pandemic began in 2020.
My dissertation is going to focus on the idea of knowledge sharing in tourism. For example, let’s say you are an orthopedic surgeon in the US and you decide to tour Benin. We would put members of the community together so that you could present how orthopedic medicine works in the US (or wherever you happen to be from). In the vein of knowledge sharing, we would then organize a visit for you to see how the traditional bone healers work in the local villages.
This idea of knowledge sharing and experiential learning is very exciting and provides an opportunity for people from different cultures and different parts of the world to share how they handle similar situations. For friendships and networking opportunities to develop.
As you can probably tell, I’m still working on the best way to explain this type of tourism, but I will get there.
The Kouda Company will also form a foundation, at this point, it will probably be called Èkodjayé, which will be the informal education environment hosting apprenticeships programs. When the student has finished the apprenticeship program, they receive a certificate of completion, in the field of their choice, and we as an organization would have made connections with local and national businesses so that would have a job available to them at the end.
The picture below shows the mind map of the beginnings of thi